How should such a pair do, but after its kind?
Life was dull without love-making, so they made it.
And the more they made, the more they wanted to make,
until casual encounters would no longer serve their
turn.

CHAPTER XIX.

Theenchantedchair.

In the castle things went on much the same, nor did
the gathering tumult without wake more than an echo
within. Yet a cloud slowly deepened upon the
brow of the marquis, and a look of disquiet, to be
explained neither by the more frequent returns of his
gout, nor by the more lengthened absences of his favourite
son. In his judgment the king was losing ground,
not only in England but in the deeper England of its
men. Lady Margaret also, for all her natural good
spirits and light-heartedness, showed a more continuous
anxiety than was to be accounted for by her lord’s
absences and the dangers he had to encounter:
little Molly, the treasure of her heart next to her
lord, had never been other than a delicate child, but
now had begun to show signs of worse than weakness
of constitution, and the heart of the mother was perpetually
brooding over the ever-present idea of her sickly
darling.

But she always did her endeavour to clear the sky
of her countenance before sitting down with her father-in-law
at the dinner-table, where still the marquis had his
jest almost as regularly as his claret, although varying
more in quality and quantity both—­now teasing
his son Charles about the holes in his pasteboard,
as he styled the castle walls; now his daughter Anne
about a design, he and no one else attributed to her,
of turning protestant and marrying Dr. Bayly; now
Dr. Bayly about his having been discovered blowing
the organ in the chapel at high mass, as he said; for
when no new joke was at hand he was fain to content
himself with falling back upon old ones. The
first of these mentioned was founded on the fact,
as undeniable as deplorable, of the weakness of many
portions of the defences, to remedy which, as far
as might be, was for the present lord Charles’s
chief endeavour, wherein he had the best possible
adviser, engineer, superintendent, and workman, all
in the person of Caspar Kaltoff. The second jest
of the marquis was a pure invention upon the liking
of lady Anne for the company and conversation of the
worthy chaplain. The last mentioned was but an
exaggeration of the following fact.

One evening the doctor came upon young Delaware, loitering
about the door of the chapel, with as disconsolate
a look as his lovely sightless face was ever seen
to wear, and, inquiring what was amiss with him, learned
that he could find no one to blow the organ bellows
for him. The youth had for years, boy as he still
was, found the main solace of his blindness in the
chapel-organ, upon which he would have played from
morning to night could he have got any one to blow
as long. The doctor, then, finding the poor boy
panting for music like the hart for the water-brooks,
but with no Jacob to roll the stone from the well’s
mouth that he might water the flocks of his thirsty
thoughts, made willing proffer of his own exertions
to blow the bellows of the organ, so long as the somewhat
wheezy bellows of his body would submit to the task.